“ It ’ s important to pick strategic partners with whom you go through the process of demand planning up to five years in advance and you ’ re sharing information so that both of you can improve the supply chain ”
— Michael Prokopis , Vice President of Supply Chain at Steward Health Care
from a different mindset than traditional healthcare and provide an outside perspective on what I think a supply chain should look like . I tell my boss all the time that we don ’ t need to reinvent the supply chain … we just need to correctly implement . It ’ s important to pick strategic partners with whom you go through the process of demand planning up to five years in advance and you ’ re sharing information so that both of you can improve the supply chain ; that is what happens in other industries with just as much unpredictability .”
With the importance of establishing and maintaining successful partnerships vital to all businesses ’ success , Steward Health Care utilises a variety of tools to help analyse a range of different data in order to predict patient volume to allow staff to be treated accordingly . Prokopis explains what he looks for when seeking to formulate a successful strategic relationship . “ At the end of the day , a good partner is the one that says , ‘ If we do this or if we try that , we have the opportunity to move this KPI or metric ’. We ’ re always looking for ‘ strategic ’ partners ; we hope someone ’ s going to come to us and say , ‘ Here ’ s some ideas that we haven ’ t implemented or maybe you haven ’ t contemplated . Let ’ s see if we can figure out how to do this together ’. Those are the kinds of things that are extremely important to do . To me , a partner is someone who really wants to work with you , that generates new ways of doing things and thinks outside the box to see if we can approach the problem from a different perspective .”
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